Friend of My Youth

her home—she had grown up about twenty miles away from Grieves School—in a
dogmatic, mystied way, emphasizing things about it that distinguished it from any
other place on earth. Houses turn black, maple syrup has a taste no maple syrup
produced elsewhere can equal, bears amble within sight of farmhouses. Of course I was
disappointed when I finally got to see this place. It was not a valley at all, if by that you
mean a cleft between hills; it was a mixture of at elds and low rocks and heavy bush
and little lakes—a scrambled, disarranged sort of country with no easy harmony about
it, not yielding readily to any description.
The log barns and unpainted house, common enough on poor farms, were not in the
Grieveses’ case a sign of poverty but of policy. They had the money but they did not
spend it. That was what people told my mother. The Grieveses worked hard and they
were far from ignorant, but they were very backward. They didn’t have a car or
electricity or a telephone or a tractor. Some people thought this was because they were
Cameronians—they were the only people in the school district who were of that religion
—but in fact their church (which they themselves always called the Reformed
Presbyterian) did not forbid engines or electricity or any inventions of that sort, just
card playing, dancing, movies, and, on Sundays, any activity at all that was not
religious or unavoidable.
My mother could not say who the Cameronians were or why they were called that.
Some freak religion from Scotland, she said from the perch of her obedient and
lighthearted Anglicanism. The teacher always boarded with the Grieveses, and my
mother was a little daunted at the thought of going to live in that black board house
with its paralytic Sundays and coal-oil lamps and primitive notions. But she was
engaged by that time, she wanted to work on her trousseau instead of running around
the country having a good time, and she gured she could get home one Sunday out of
three. (On Sundays at the Grieveses’ house, you could light a re for heat but not for
cooking, you could not even boil the kettle to make tea, and you were not supposed to
write a letter or swat a y. But it turned out that my mother was exempt from these
rules. “No, no,” said Flora Grieves, laughing at her. “That doesn’t mean you. You must
just go on as you’re used to doing.” And after a while my mother had made friends with
Flora to such an extent that she wasn’t even going home on the Sundays when she’d
planned to.)
Flora and Ellie Grieves were the two sisters left of the family. Ellie was married, to a
man called Robert Deal, who lived there and worked the farm but had not changed its
name to Deal’s in anyone’s mind. By the way people spoke, my mother expected the
Grieves sisters and Robert Deal to be middle-aged at least, but Ellie, the younger sister,
was only about thirty, and Flora seven or eight years older. Robert Deal might be in
between.
The house was divided in an unexpected way. The married couple didn’t live with
Flora. At the time of their marriage, she had given them the parlor and the dining room,
the front bedrooms and staircase, the winter kitchen. There was no need to decide about
the bathroom, because there wasn’t one. Flora had the summer kitchen, with its open
rafters and uncovered brick walls, the old pantry made into a narrow dining room and